MIT Offers new Insights into Vision

Pawan Sinha and
other MIT
researchers have combined MRI scans, René Magritte paintings, and a
study of
individuals who are born blind but later gain some vision to offer new
insights into how the human brain recognizes objects and, in particular,
faces. Humans are much better at recognizing faces than the best
machine vision, even when the faces are extremely blurred. Humans use
contextual clues that are not available to most machine vision
systems. Up until now, machine vision developers have intentionally
removed or cleaned-up images by isolating the object of
interest (which precludes consideration of contextual clues). An MIT News
story summarizes the research. For more see the Sinha Lab Vision
Research webpage.